Rogue Columnist

'Why do you hate Arizona?'

This was a question asked by a reader of a recent post. It's a fair question that deserves an answer. I will try to be concise.

1. I am not selling anything associated with the sunshine/real estate Ponzi scheme, so I have no reason to lie to the boobs -- oops, potential customers from the Midwest or inland California about the true state of affairs in Arizona.

2. I am not one of the boobs from the Midwest or inland California who bought into what was billed as "a piece of unspoiled Sonoran Desert -- with championship golf!," only to find dreary suburbia in a frying pan set on high. And now I'm too embarrassed to admit I was a sucker but angry at anyone who implies it.

3. I am not a member of the Real Estate Industrial Complex or the Kookocracy. Therefore, I don't profit from either the booster growthgasm Kook-Aid, the ongoing destruction of the state or the constant inflaming of grievances against "guvment," brown people or columnists who speak truth to power.

4. I am a mean, mean man.

The doomsday machine

Two new books and an article in Wired are making more people aware of the doomsday system constructed by the Soviets during the 1980s, when they feared an American nuclear attack. Perimeter, nicknamed "the Dead Hand," went operational in 1986 and guaranteed that even if the leadership was killed and all command-and-control systems disrupted, the Soviets would still launch an all-out nuclear counter-attack. Like Skynet of the Terminator movies -- Linda Hamilton, call your office. And "the dead hand" is still operational, although Moscow officially won't discuss it. It's a good thing nothing ever goes wrong with complex systems.

As we observe a one-year anniversary nearly every day of some calamity from last year's Great Panic, I can't stop that feeling of grating ambivalence. Yes, Messers Bernanke, Paulson and Geithner averted a collapse of "the global financial system" and perhaps averted another Great Depression. That's the story line and even I buy it most of the time. But now the too-big-to-fail banks have gotten even bigger. The derivative boys are back at work. Promised re-regulation is being gutted. The pain has fallen on average Americans and the American taxpayer.

It's almost as if "the global financial system" built its own Dead Hand doomsday machine. So the question becomes: Did we avert apocalypse last fall and winter, fortunately shutting down this fearsome device. Or did we actually arm it by our actions. In other words, should we have called the bastards' bluffs in late 2008?

Phoenix 101: 'Master planned communities'

Phoenix had perhaps the worst luck of any major American city from the standpoint of urban design and civic beauty. It came of age in a huge spurt of growth in the 1950s and beyond. The City Beautiful Movement was forgotten. Suburbia, lookalike houses, automobiles and long single-occupancy car trips moved to the center of American life.

An old city still exists — what wasn't torn down by City Hall from the '70s through the '90s — but it's not much and most Phoenicians don't even realize it exists. When I lived in Willo, it was always painfully entertaining to be picked up by the airport shuttle, already full of people from the suburbs. They were giddy over the front porches! The shade trees! The old houses and walkable neighborhood and closeness to the center of the city! I learned that their real-estate agents had never even showed them this part of the city.

Suburbia wasn't always, as Jim Kunstler would put it, a cartoon landscape not worth caring about. Willo was once a suburb on the streetcar from a compact Phoenix. In Cincinnati, there's the magical Mariemont, a leafy "planned town" from the 1920s, which accommodated the American longing to "get out of the awful city," while creating a real community and a real human space worth caring about. It was accessible by — especially by — streetcar and interurban railway to downtown Cincinnati. Now the latter two are long gone as America has embraced a life with fewer choices.

A large number of people in metro Phoenix and a majority of the Anglo middle class  live in something altogether different — a radical enterprise that has transformed civic life, urban form and even democracy: the "master planned community."

Arizona, unstimulated

The political faith of the Kookocracy is not just that government "is the problem," but that government is outright evil. Without the socialist Jan Brewer restraining them, they dream of a state with a government out of the Coolidge years (without that pesky Herbert Hoover as Commerce Secretary). I'll never forget giving a speech to some Phoenix Young Republicans. A woman in her twenties said all aid to the less fortunate should be terminated. If they protest? "Shoot them in the streets," she said, chillingly serious.

Of course, in the reality based world Arizona is a government creation, and takes more in government services than it pays in taxes. It is a welfare queen. Despite all the cries of "SOCIALISM," it has taken federal stimulus money. Nevertheless, the faith persists. Low taxes, little regulation and a continuing battle to stifle any "activism" (such as funding Science Foundation Arizona or that Don Budinger and his efforts to improve impoverished schools) will produce the best "business climate" in the country. Anybody in need, well, deserves their lot. Best-practices used around the world for economic development are SOCIALISM!!

So how's that working out for you?

Arizona gets an F grade in the new Assets and Opportunities Scorecard from the non-partisan (and backed by big business) CFed. Arizona is one of only five states to get the lowest grade in this report that tracks 92 measures of well-being. Its peers are all in the South. You don't need a report to know the depression that is ravaging Phoenix. One out of four residents is uninsured.

Valley of denial

ASU's Morrison Institute has always labored under two Sisyphean tasks. First, its public-policy scholarship necessarily antagonized the state's ruling elites -- hence, it was forced to pull its punches to avoid losing funding, and, even then, the elites wouldn't accept its work. Second, it was treated in the media as the "liberal" equivalent of the (Bob) Goldwater Institute. This, even though the "Goldwater" Institute is an arm of the national right-wing advocacy machine, not a genuine think tank that engages in open-minded, peer-reviewed research. With the loss a few years ago of my sometime collaborator Mary Jo Waits, author of Morrison's most prescient and important works (Five Shoes, Meds and Eds), the institute became even more marginalized. Now Morrison is trying once again to become part of the conversation under the leadership of Sue Clark-Johnson, retired Arizona Republic publisher and close friend of ASU President Michael Crow.

Good luck. Unfortunately, the first effort, Forum 411, seems destined for the dustbin of forgotten, well-intended reports at an even faster speed than its predecessors. It is brief, as to be expected from an entity now headed by a former Gannett executive, and strives to be inoffensive. Think of a pep talk. Anthony Robbins on economic development. It states two broad themes: the obvious (Arizona needs to diversify its economy) and the untrue (which I will deal with momentarily). Worst of all, it leaves critical information entirely out. The loss of Waits' intellectual heft is obvious. So, too, is the continued bowing before the Real Estate Industrial Complex (the report's sponsor is the suburban mall developer, Westcor).

The Hispanic illusion

Progressives and liberals cling to the expectation that Republican antagonism of Hispanics will lead to electoral disaster. This was ever-present during the confirmation fight over Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Now the predictions of GOP doom are back. This time Republicans are slitting their own throats by using the health-care-for-illegal-immigrants lie to reignite the anti-immigrant (anti-Hispanic) hysteria in The Base. This is suicide to alienate the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority, and it will be especially lethal for Republicans in the Southwest, with its huge Hispanic population. That, at least, is the view from Washington, D.C. The reality can be summed up in two words.

Joe Arpaio.

The Italian-American sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, anchored by the nation's fifth-largest city, Arpaio waged a vicious campaign against illegals ahead of last fall's election. Egged on by talk-radio haters, the "sweeps" were part of a notorious climate of antagonism against all Hispanics, even Mexican-Americans who have been in the country for generations. Arpaio didn't go after the Anglo Republicans who employed the illegals. He arrested the weak, the vulnerable, the already exploited. Maricopa County is at least one-third Hispanic citizens who might object to this racist atmosphere. Risky, no? And it should be added that the incumbent was lacking in many ways that informed citizens of ethnic groups should have found deserving of a swift kick to the door. Arpaio was re-elected by a landslide -- and the sweeps mostly stopped, having served their purpose for a publicity seeking hotdog many other cops call "The Badged Ego."

They welcome our hatred

Events forced me to fly across the country. Because the old bereavement fares have gone the way of free (and tasty) meals, in-flight movies, free baggage check and an airport experience not out of Lockup Raw, USAirways got quite the bite out of my wallet. The flight was late and several restrooms on the 757 were not working. Of course the entire process -- from getting out of the taxi under the din of recorded commands to reaching the gate area which never has enough seats for waiting passengers -- was a joy.

The airlines don't care. We're stuck. Where in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt announced that never before in American history had the forces of money and privilege been arrayed against one candidate, and "I welcome their hatred," now the situation is reversed. More and more, highly concentrated industries and the moneyed elites welcome our hatred, then keep on tightening the screws. Americans sheepishly accept the hatred and queue right up for more.

Other sectors come to mind beyond airlines, health insurance and "financial services" at the top of the list. President Obama seems determined to get insurance industry "buy in" on health care reform, so we know how that song will end. It's appropriate to remember our friends the bankers on the anniversary of the failure of Lehman Brothers. A year later, the TARP money is unaccounted for, the industry is more concentrated and thus dangerous than ever, and real regulatory reform appears DOA. And for these privileges, Americans will get ever more gouged on banking fees and insurance premiums -- if they can even keep the latter. Meanwhile, executive salaries and profits keep rising.

The debates we're not having

As masterful as President Obama's health care speech was, he operates in a nation that is increasingly losing the capacity to govern itself. The blurt of the loutish South Carolina Republican congressman, calling the president a liar, something I have never heard in listening to presidential addresses before that body since JFK...well, that's the least of the problem.

Health care reform foundered on the vicious lies of a well-organized minority and, apparently, the simple-mindedness of the American people (all manipulated by the health industries' hundreds of millions of lobbying dollars). The side dish was the ongoing hyperventilation over the president's citizenship or lack thereof. Then came the hysteria over his "indoctrination" of schoolchildren from a harmless speech (two other presidents have done this, with no controversy). All this from a minority of nuts -- and their reactionary masters -- who nonetheless dominated the television from which most Americans get their "news." This is how we spent our summer. One would never know who won the election last fall.

Think of all we're not discussing. Not even thinking about as a nation.

Phoenix Underworld

The scene after Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was fatally injured when a bomb went off in his car in 1976.

You don't have to scrape too far beneath the veneer of "a clean, new, well-run city" to understand that Phoenix is perhaps historically one of America's more corrupt, crime-run cities. It didn't get a great city in exchange for its corruption, as with Chicago. And being crime-run isn't the same as being crime-ridden, so whatever statistics the boosters pull out to show community safety are really beside the point.

It's long been this way. When I was a child, Phoenicians sniffed that Tucson was the Mafia town, with Joe Bonanno, Pete Licavoli Sr., and company. Yet the FBI estimated that in the 1960s Phoenix had more mobsters per capita than New York City. I grew up just a few blocks from the house where, in 1958, Gus Greenbaum and his wife had their throats slit in retaliation for Gus' skimming from the casino tills in Vegas (and, local lore has it, the hitmen then ate the steaks the Greenbaums had just cooked). Phoenix was full of bars (Rocky's Hideaway, the old Blue Grotto, Ivanhoe, the Clown's Den, etc.) frequented by made men and the wanna-bes.

This was not the result, as some would have it, of "the Wild West atmosphere." Rather, it was the interface between a city growing too fast with few rules or institutional checks and the migration of Midwestern gangsters to exploit the situation (or, later, to be relocated by the feds). And an establishment willing to look the other way, or join in the "business." A culture of fraud built on successive real-estate booms, or scandals such as the collapse of Arizona Savings in the early 1960s, also made the city a magnet for criminals. The most prominent figure in this was Ned Warren (aka Nathan Waxman), the Kingpin of Arizona Land Fraud. He figured in the Bolles bombing.

Economic musical chairs

Who are the winners and losers in the "recovery"? Check out my assessment on Britannica Blog.

Is it incompetence or the quiet coup?

It's gonna be a long three-and-a-half years.

When all the autopsies are completed on the Obama administration's early train wreck, all the shoulda-woulda-coulda, this is the most salient point. Whatever eloquence the president musters on Wednesday night, it's over -- or almost so. One wonders if the crew in the White House is still so dazzled by the whole West Wing thing that they don't even realize their peril, and hence the nation's peril.

We know a few things. Obama is no FDR. Not only does he lack Roosevelt's deviousness, but he also has no Harry Hopkins, Rex Tugwell, Harold M. Ickes, Adolf Berle, Tommy Corcoran or Raymond Moley. Rahm Emmanuel? Give me a break. He may be a tough guy in the tussle over office space, but he and the president's other advisers have done Obama no favors, much less provided the ideas, toughness and administrative savvy of FDR's Brains Trust and other close aides.

The closer comparisons so far are less flattering. Herbert Hoover -- another brilliant,  accomplished, initially beloved public servant who froze in the headlights. and became more detached as crisis progressed. Jimmy Carter -- elected in a spirit of hope and revulsion against Republican crimes (literally) who crashed early on the rocks of Congress and never recovered. Obama lacks Carter's insufferable sanctimoniousness, but he has revealed one ruinous similarity: weakness. Successful presidents are never weak.

Arizona: Image and reality

It's easy to return from vacation because the Arizona Laff Riot writes my best material for me. Case in point: A Page One story in the Information Center headlined, "Does Arizona have an image problem?"

When some future Gibbon writes about the decline and fall of American civilization -- which you're getting to live through -- he or she will find ample material in the treasure paid out to management consultants. One of their favorite tricks is to distract productive employees with drivel over "image" and "branding." This works to the advantage of entrenched management and culture because it avoids dealing with real problems that are substantive, not image. And so it is, especially, with the Grand Canyon State.

The Information Center editors apparently gave the reporter the task of blaming the state's recent high-profile troubles on "the spotlight cast by cable-news pundits, newspaper editorials and blogs - including censure from a world-renowned travel writer" and "the flow of bad publicity." The real danger posed by an assault-rifle wielding man at an appearance by the president -- danger in itself, and the menace it unleashes in the minds of the already unhinged lunatic fringe -- was merely a "stunt." Phoenix's lethal achievement as America's people-smuggling and kidnapping capital, as well as a major distribution center for drugs to the U.S. and guns to Mexico -- all airy misperceptions.